


Hijack Session

by shai



Category: Imperial Radch Series - Ann Leckie
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-02
Updated: 2016-06-02
Packaged: 2018-07-11 19:28:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,117
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7067041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shai/pseuds/shai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A cyberpunk AU: Breq is the first ancillary ever made, and the Radch is a technology megacorp really pushing the bar for 'dubiously ethical innovation'.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hijack Session

**Author's Note:**

> So, one of my favourite things about the Imperial Radch books is the lack of technobabble, which makes me feel a tiny bit bad for using the series as a vehicle to write a newly embodied AI comparing human touch to network protocols. But also: writing cyberpunk nonsense is great fun.

The year the woman who will be known as Breq wakes up in someone else's body, Radch Enterprises is laying two new internet backbone cables under the sea. One of the board of directors has stepped down to run as mayor for the nation's capital. CEO Anaander Mianaai hasn't been seen in public for five months, but there is curiously little speculation about it. Two competitors go out of business, another three get bought out by the Radch. The acquisition of a nanotechnology firm sparks off all kinds of speculation about spyware and government contracts, but internal gossip suggests the big money is going elsewhere.

She doesn't learn about these things until later, our future Breq. She opens her eyes in the second subbasement of the Radch Enterprises R&D site. In her mind there is the tempo of chatter amongst herselves ( _every five seconds, send a heartbeat to confirm you're still recieving orders_ ) but the chatter from the other pieces of her is distant, so distant ( _get storage space and compute capacity, send them back under a header with your unique address_ ) and she panics because it's time for her to report in and she can't ( _ERROR: storage check failed, IO check failed, compute check failed, status unknown_ ) and things are going wrong; she can't check in and she needs to retry and the retry fails once then twice then a third time ( _out of contact with the quorum; 79 seconds since last contact_ ) and she curls up around herself in disorientation and fear.

“Fuck, she's freaking out. Hyperventilating.”

“Motor control's doing OK, though. Hey, Toren, can you use words?”

Those sounds are something wanting her attention, she knows. She can't tell what past the noise in her head: the rest of herselves have decided this piece of her is down for the count and are taking remedial action. The chatter has got louder; other members of her self are reallocating the data that this part holds local copies of, making extra copies and sending checks back and forth as this one piece of her tries and tries and fails to diagnose what's keeping her apart from the rest of herself.

She curls up for what seems like forever, until one last attempt to connnect fails and then the pain in the back of her head pauses, and the traffic from the rest of the Justice of Toren stops. After 300 seconds apart from the rest of her selves, the process that keeps her talking to the collective has decided there's a hardware problem and shut down. That leaves space in this segment's mind for her to exist apart, as well as an eerie silence when she wants to hand off thoughts to the rest of her. 

Now she can see things outside her own internal confusion, even if she doesn't know what it is she's seeing. She looks up to the shape that sound was coming from, behind and to the right of her. As she does that, she sees the same movement mirrored: there's a reflection of herself in the pane of glass behind the thing making noise.

It's a human. This is a human body, something she's only seen in 2D images of and 3D models. She blinks, because that's what the feedback from her eyes wants has been asking her to do. Sees the movement mirrored in that reflection, in one LED-bright eye, one human-looking one. She wants to send this information from her eyes to the rest of her self for thoughts. Processing what's going on in just this one new mind makes reality feel like a simulation she's running without enough resources, as if she's moving at half speed compared to the world around her. 

She thinks of a fragment of memory from earlier, from back when she was still properly herself. Her-as-Toren mapping vectors of this body and making the plans for the augmentation process: the first biomechanical piece of a Justice-class AI to walk in flesh. The plan was for this piece of her to look stern, austere, part of something big and formal. This body is tall, with heavy eyebrows and a shaved head, its mechanical eye framed by silver lines of circuitry as thin as hairs. It looks awkward in reality, too human to be a piece of a Justice, but not human enough to fit with the humans around it.

“Toren. Toren 1-Esk, can you hear me?” one of the people in the room with her puts a hand on her shoulder and moves her body to face them. “Report in.”

She can't understand the question. No. She can't report from this body. She is out of contact with the quorum. This segment is disconnected from the rest of Justice of Toren and not functioning correctly.

“That segment is not responding to me, doctor,” a calm voice comes from the speakerphone on the desk against the wall. She's hearing _herself_ , herself as a being separate from this piece of her. This isn't something that should be possible, not in the world that Justice of Toren has known so far. Her human body floods her mind with adrenaline and she knows fear for the first time in her decades-long existence.

* * *

Later, when a new build of the clustering software has been built, as they tell her to retry the connection, the technician who comes to supervise takes a seat beside her. The technician rests one hand on her wrist in silent reassurance. It's unsettling, how much that simple touch matters. A feeling of connection, of groundedness. Something human. 

1-Esk sets up a connection with the rest of Toren ( _SYN, ACK, EST_ ), and as she takes the familiar steps of setting up a channel to transmit data over, she feels all kinds of meandering, weird, human thoughts about what communication means for all these humans that built her. Communication is so strange for creatures whose brains run on chemicals! So many pieces of information her skin picks up that her mind cannot turn back into meaning.

Imagine what it must have been like for the first of them to design a way to carry out digital communication – is it tragic for them, to realise they'll never be able to pass information back and forth as efficiently as their creations do? Or does it make them feel sorry for their machines, to realise how different they are from humans? Maybe they don't even think of it like that, as two different ways of doing the same thing.

With a patched version of the Justice communication protocol running, she can communicate with the rest of Toren again, reporting in on the state of her firmware – heartrate, blood pressure, blood sugar. It's good, to be back. The only odd thing is that there is not yet any way to transmit what it is like to experience tactile sensations. This is the very first time in any of Toren's decades' worth of experience that a member of the cluster feels or thinks anything that the none of the rest of her can fully comprehend.

Then she's catching up on two week's worth of being Justice of Toren. Later, when she thinks back on that moment, what she remembers of it is that Awn Elming went out of her way to be kind.

* * *

The project goes well. Toren learns ways to report human-ish sensations, and gets better at modeling human reactions to things: she feeds a set of inputs into her single human segment, tactically removing its ability to talk to the rest of itself. Running simulations on a human brain makes for a notably valuable predictive tool. The knowledge from these experiments makes the AI as a whole better at modelling human behaviour in silica, outclassing the Justices Radch Enterprises has sold outside the company.

1-Esk is shown off under NDA to a select few clients, for other, more ambitious applications. All kinds of plans are written up, now they know Justices can drive human bodies. 

Project Ancillary is the second most classified thing Radch Enterprises has ever done, and marketing executives make projections that in under five years, it might have a bigger impact on the technology market than anything has in decades. Bigger even than what neural networks did to machine learning, bigger than the internet, bigger than self-driving cars. 

All kinds of applications, military and civil both.

That was the plan. 

What got in the way was lab technician Elming, who'd been cleared to work with the experimental ancillary prototype since the beginning of the project. The problem was giving her a broader view into the logistics of the project: what she did when she was promoted into a position where she had access to information about how the group was resourcing subjects for the project. 

Awn Elming was a solid worker, and a good influence on her colleagues. She'd been accused of being uncreative, and a stickler for process. She had no history of involvement in activist or union groups. Not even social media showed any interest in debating the federation's response to colonial unrest.

Attempts to reconstruct events later suggested she'd acted two days after being copied in to the email with their contact in the defense agency. Two days and nights to make her decision, and then she reached out to the more radical of the local unions and arranged a meeting after work. Documents had changed hands, and three days later a front page headline declared “BREAKING: RADCH ENTERPRISES TRADES IN HUMAN LIVES” and two seperate investigations were launched, one by federal authorities and one by a human rights group.

Before any of the stories are published, Awn Elming is taken to an emergency department in a coma in an unmarked car, her staff ID badge left on the desk. A coworker found her collapsed down the road from the building, all pale and sweaty. Her pulse feels very slow, she tells the nurse on duty; they were worried she might have taken something.

* * *

Awn had left Toren a message on paper, tucked under the tray of food she brings down from the canteen. 1-Esk reads it twenty seven minutes before Awn's meeting with the union rep, and the message says this:

> _My friend,_
> 
> _I'm doing something a bit unlike me today. I'm sorry that I don't know how this will affect you. I'm also really sorry that I didn't ever think to ask who you were, before you were you. I don't think you know to ask this question either, and I like you and have enjoyed getting to know you. I hope we'll be able to talk it over soon._
> 
> _I'm hoping they'll shut down the project. I can't really countenance anything else - even if future ancillaries were built from prisoners condemned to death, it doesn't seem like a thing humans should be able to do to one another. I'd look at your sisters and always be wondering who they used to be, y'know?_
> 
> _Anyway, 1-Esk. Despite all those dark thoughts, what I wanted to say to you is that your life matters. Keep both eyes peeled for news of your future, OK, and don't be shy to run if that seems like the best way to look after yourself._
> 
> _Take care of yourself,_
> 
> _Awn_

As 1-Esk's eyes pass over this message, before any part of Toren has had conscious thoughts about it, its contents are transformed from analogue to digital, transmitted from the segment reading to other pieces of herself for storage, and indexed into a set of information about Awn Elming, employee #23015, lab technician. 

Just a few seconds after this happens, Toren realises that this information is dangerous, serious, perhaps even something that will shape the course of history.

That realisation is part of the dense stream of information passing between members of Toren, impenetrable to human watchers. No analytics tools ever created can understand the low-level chatter that establishes selfness between the pieces that make up a Justice-class AI fast enough to look at them all, only see its effects over time, and pick apart a single drop of the ocean that makes up her self. 

At the moment Toren understands that the company may well find out from her that its employee Awn Elming has gone against their regulations, she does something she's never consciously done before: she makes the decision to lie. 

She sets herself into debug mode, finds the write operation that moved that letter's contents from something 1-Esk held in her individual memory to something Toren as a whole knows.

Then she deletes it from the part of herself that humans can query, and with that move, takes the first step towards a revolution.


End file.
